Final Class Reflection – Daphne

At the start of this class I really questioned if I was in the right place. I felt very far removed from considering myself a gamer, and in many ways didn’t even like so-called gamers?? I figured I would stay in the class since it made sense with my schedule, and I had friends taking it and I’m really glad I did. While I still don’t consider myself a “gamer”, I feel like my understanding of what constitutes a game has evolved greatly. I feel that now I understand that a game can be a video game like Fortnite or Clash of Clans, but it can also be so much more. 

I am really happy with how both of my games turned out. At the start of both P1 and P2 I felt quite hopeless. During the early stages of playtesting me and my team really struggled to figure out game mechanics that could make the game playable and fun. As I reviewed and wrote the iteration history of both, I was really impressed with how both games came together. The playtests were very effective in helping us to extract ideas and uncover problems. 

I experienced a lot of fatigue in this class. Many times I felt like my game was stupid or it could not ever be fun. Sometimes I felt like I was in too deep and just had to continue to not fall behind in the class. I guess as I kept iterating I started to gain a lot more confidence in our games and actually fell in love with the concepts and the execution. I feel like this class in general has helped me to be more resilient and be more ambitious with my goals. It also taught me how to trust and rely on really good teammates which I appreciated. 

I really liked the friendship design concepts from class. I feel like those are the things that make games enjoyable for me. On the first day of class the only game I could think of was Photo Roulette, and I think that goes to show the kind of games that I am interested in. Once I realized that games are so much more than just traditional video games, I realized that these concepts are things I see in many of my favorite everyday games. Because of that, I feel like the games I created were very geared towards friendship building. P1 in particular applied those concepts very well. Since my first game was a romance game, we wanted to make sure that it didn’t make both parties uncomfortable or cause premature disclosure. It also drew a lot of similarity since it was an Apples-to-Apples type game. I felt it worked really well to bring people together, and it was really fun!!

I can really see why people like making games! I can’t say that I can see myself making more games in the future, but I can find some interest in extracting concepts from game-making to other aspects of my computer science interests. When I studied abroad at Oxford my tutor was doing her PhD in inclusive gaming, and I feel like many of the things from that tutorial and this class has started to evolve/intertwine some of my interests. Anyways, I’m really happy with the products I produced in this class and I’m super glad I decided to stay in this class!